It's original classification was wrong. What a surprise. Which means it was assigned to an examiner who examines things other than network and messaging BS on a regular basis. After cursory review of claim 1, my immediate impression is that there's an RSS system that anticipates it.

nickerj1:It's original classification was wrong. What a surprise. Which means it was assigned to an examiner who examines things other than network and messaging BS on a regular basis. After cursory review of claim 1, my immediate impression is that there's an RSS system that anticipates it.

I don't know about that... RSS systems are pull based, while this is push based. In particular, an RSS system wouldn't be server side and broadcast messages out to each endpoint.You'd probably get closer with listserv stuff.

Or for that matter, any public posting service like a blog or, a web site?

No. If you read the claims, it looks like it is patenting the ability to "follow" other users and get their updates. Topic-based forums would probably be non-infringing. I'm not sure if it is different than Facebook walls, tho'. I just quickly scanned the claims.

Or for that matter, any public posting service like a blog or, a web site?

No. If you read the claims, it looks like it is patenting the ability to "follow" other users and get their updates. Topic-based forums would probably be non-infringing. I'm not sure if it is different than Facebook walls, tho'. I just quickly scanned the claims.

Yeah. Why I mentioned Listserv is that you can subscribe to the list, and another user can send a message that doesn't need to identify you individually - the server will broadcast the message to all of the subscribers.

Or for that matter, any public posting service like a blog or, a web site?

No. If you read the claims, it looks like it is patenting the ability to "follow" other users and get their updates. Topic-based forums would probably be non-infringing. I'm not sure if it is different than Facebook walls, tho'. I just quickly scanned the claims.

If you read the claims, it looks like it is patenting the ability to "follow" other users and get their updates.

But a practically equivalent service was available since the 1980s: MIT's Zephyr. You subscribe to a set of destination triples (class, instance, recipient-username). Class and instance are strings. Instance can be a wildcard '*' and recipient-username can be the wildcard '*' or your own username. An access control list on the server can be used to limit sending or receiving messages on any of these triples.

This can be used to implement per-user following. Assign by convention (twitter, <username>, *) to mean tweets from <username> to anybody who is listening. I don't know whether Zephyr server software as delivered supports the ACL to do that securely, but security is not part of the first claim. With the standard client it is easy to set up a filter in the receiver to reject any message that is not authenticated as coming from the person who "owns" the channel.

There have been multiple clients since the 1980s, and communication between sites (as opposed to within a site) since the early 1990s.

Or for that matter, any public posting service like a blog or, a web site?

No. If you read the claims, it looks like it is patenting the ability to "follow" other users and get their updates. Topic-based forums would probably be non-infringing. I'm not sure if it is different than Facebook walls, tho'. I just quickly scanned the claims.

Actually, most forums let me click on a user name and see all of their recent posts. Same with just about every Usenet/NNTP client. A couple of game forums I follow have the ability to subscribe to certain users so you can see what the game developers are posting. I'm seeing prior art all over the place.